UNIQLO founder and chairman Tadashi Yanai — Japan’s wealthiest man — who runs one of the world’s largest apparel retail company Fast Retailing Group said the company has made significant investments in India ahead of the brand’s maiden store launch in the country on Friday.
The H&M Group has partnered with The Renewal Workshop to debut a new test collection made from unsold clothes that have been repaired and brought back to market through its COS (Collection of Style) branded stores.
H&M says this ‘first of its kind’ ‘Restore’ collection developed by its internal innovation department ‘The Laboratory’ will and its fashion brand COS (Collection of Style) will launch tomorrow in three stores located in Berlin, Stockholm and Utrecht. The COS brand launched in 2007 and currently operates over 250 stores in more than 40 worldwide markets.
Thirty-two luxury, fashion and textile companies have signed a new commitment to protect climate, biodiversity and the oceans of the world, calling the new initiative the Fashion Pact.
Representatives presented the idea of the new agreement to the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, at a special meeting in Paris on August 23. Mr Macron arranged for the leaders of the G7 group of the wealthiest states in the world to see a presentation on the Fashion Pact during the G7 Summit in Biarritz, which takes place from August 24-26.
Singapore-based RGE has joined H&M and a number of other groups to invest in Finnish waste-to-textile-fibres start-up Infinited Fiber Company Oy (IFC). RGE has also signed a co-operation agreement with the Finnish company to help commercialise its technology.
Since early 2018, IFC has been operating a 50-tonne per annum pilot plant in Espoo that produces textile fibres testing purposes. H&M and VF Corporation are among the groups testing the fibres the Espoo operation has produced so far.
The apparel retailer said that the composition of inventory has improved, implying it will become easier to sell the garments.
Hennes & Mauritz AB surged after the struggling Swedish clothing retailer showed progress coping with a buildup of unsold garments, raising hopes that the worst may be over after a three-year slump in earnings.
Inventory dropped slightly as a proportion of sales, easing to 18.2% at the end of May from a record 18.9% as of last August, H&M said Thursday. CEO Karl-Johan Persson said H&M still aims to boost operating profit this year.
People are buying more clothing today than they did 15 years ago.
But they’re only wearing it half as long.
That means clothing production and sales are both on the rise, and so is the amount of clothing in landfills.
In such a climate, “fast-fashion” companies, like Forever 21 and Zaful, are growing, said Karen Leonas, a professor in the Wilson College of Textiles at N.C. State University. And thrift stores and secondhand clothing sales are growing even faster, at 24 times the rate of other retail.
Online marketing solution firm SEMrush updated its list of the most searched global fashion sites, and H&M took the top spot, knocking Macy’s to the number-two position. Russian e-commerce site Wildberries came in third.
Separately, the company said it has rolled out a new platform for Amazon sellers, called Sellerly. “Sellerly allows users to run a split test of different product detail pages to see which of the options gets the most views and better conversions,” the company said in a statement.
Fruit and vegetables are good for us. We all know that. But what if our clothes counted towards our five a day? Would that make the planet healthier, too? We are told the one thing we can do to reduce our carbon emissions is to eat less beef, so the next step would be to wear less leather. We also know that cotton production is water-intensive and polluting. So the next generation of textiles made from apple peel, grape pulp, oranges and pineapples is here not a moment too soon. Never mind eat more greens. What we really need is to wear them.
Fashion brand H&M has become the first major retailer to list individual supplier details for each garment on its website to increase transparency in an industry with high risks of slavery and labour abuses.
The Sweden-based multinational’s move was hailed by workers rights groups who said it was a step forward, but added that the data may not be particularly meaningful to shoppers without additional information to put it into context.
Mass market retailer Target has today joined over 170 brands and apparel industry stakeholders by committing to the CanopyStyle initiative in a bid to ensure the use of ancient and endangered forest fibre is not found in its own viscose textile supply chain.
Target says it will “pursue, with a goal of achieving by (end of) 2020, viscose apparel garment supply chains that are free of ancient and endangered forests, endangered species and controversial sources.”
